Assail (Malazan Empire, #6)(3)

‘Others of us must have found it before, certainly,’ another, Guth, commented.

‘And what became of them …?’ Shalt answered, thoughtfully, peering into the mist to the far shore of the sheltered bay.

The other ravaged faces turned as well and all were silent and still for a time. So quiet and motionless were they that an eagle flew overhead to stoop the waters, its talons slicing the surface. It rose with a fish struggling in its claws, and perched in a nearby half-dead fir to tear at its meal.

The faces of all the Imass had turned silently to follow the course of its flight.

‘Favourable, or unfavourable?’ J’arl asked into the continued silence.

‘Are we the eagle?’ answered another. ‘Or the fish?’

Shalt extended a withered arm to the bay. ‘Others are fishing as well,’ she pronounced.

They started picking their way round the curve of the shore.

First to emerge from the mist were the prows of hide boats pulled up on the strand of black gravel that climbed steeply to the forested rocky slope. Smoke trailed through the trees. Shalt glimpsed a stout log structure high on the slope. Figures now came running down a trail. They carried spears armed with stone heads, maces of stones tied to wood handles. They wore stained and beaded leathers and animal hide capes.

‘Humans,’ Guth observed, unimpressed. ‘We should search inland.’

‘Pity they chose not to talk,’ Shalt judged, almost with a sigh. ‘We will scout inland.’

J’arl thrust up a withered hand, all sinew and bone. ‘I ask for a pause. There is something …’

Shalt regarded him. She tilted her age-gnawed head. ‘A presence?’

‘Something,’ he repeated, wary, as if unwilling to say more.

The local people had formed a line inland. They yelled and shook their weapons. Shalt studied them: much taller than she and her stock. Prominent jaws, large teeth. Similar in features – probably the descendants of a small breeding population. Such was not so unusual among her own kind, long ago.

Her band was disappearing one by one, moving on, when one of the locals shouted something Shalt understood: ‘Be gone, demons from the outside!’

The words used made all her remaining band reflexively draw their blades. For they were in the Jaghut tongue. Shalt stepped forward. ‘Whence came you by this language?’ she asked in the same tongue.

‘It is known to us of old, demon,’ an elder answered, sneering.

Known? she repeated, wonderingly. How can this be?

‘And we have been warned of your kind,’ he continued. ‘Be gone! You are not welcome here.’

Shalt raised her chin, the flesh worn away from one side of her mandible, and scented again, deeply. What came on the air staggered her, and were she not of the Imass she would perhaps have fainted into unconsciousness from the challenge it presented to her very core.

‘Abomination…’ J’arl breathed in an exhalation of cold air. He raised his blade.

No! Shalt cried to herself. They are human! We mustn’t slide down this path … it will lead us to annihilation.

J’arl started forward and Shalt acted without thought. Her blade sliced through vertebrae at the juncture of neck and shoulder. J’arl slumped, though she knew he was not finished utterly.

Up and down the shore her band exploded into a whirling mêlée of Imass striking Imass. Flint blades clashed and grated in a burst of clamour that sent all the nearby birds skyward in alarm. A group coalesced round Shalt who directed them into a line defending the milling locals.

‘Flee the coast!’ she shouted to the people as she blocked a strike from Guth. ‘Flee!’

‘They will be found,’ Guth promised her as he strained. ‘If not us, then others.’

Shalt cut him down as well and wept as she fought, for he had been a companion of uncountable years.

She spared the mêlée a glance and despaired. The aggressors far outnumbered the defenders. Yet she was First of the Band for a reason and she fought even as all her allies fell about her. She was last, giving ground, suffering strikes that shaved dried flesh from her limbs and cut rotted hide from her shoulders. Now her skills overcame the constraints of the attackers who fell one by one before the two-handed blade, so thin as to be translucent, that she flicked and turned as lightly as a green branch.

A blow took her skull. It severed bone down past her right occipital ridge. Yet even as her skull shattered she dropped this last aggressor and wailed at the necessity, for it was Bruj’el, a bull of a warrior, and cousin to her mate gone these many centuries.

She turned to the people. She could sense her animating spirit fleeing its flawed vessel. Her Tellann-provided vision was darkening, withdrawing. She fell to her bony knees. She dropped her blade to brace herself with one hand and breathed out one last fading sigh to the staring, awed figures.

‘Hide yourselves …’





CHAPTER I



KYLE SAT IN his accustomed seat in a sailors’ dive in kevil, Mare, of south Fist, and considered his dwindling stash of coins, and thus options, for escaping these damnably insular Korel lands. It was a region so notoriously hostile to foreigners that should any here find him, an obvious stranger, wounded in the street, many would go out of their way to kick and spit upon him.

Especially as he wore the gear of the hated Malazans.